I've tried two times to reinstall the entire mess...all my images are "save-for-web" from photoshop. And these are SMALL images, on average 450 x 250 pixels + 150kb.

using php version 5.2 "--with-gd"

when I upload I get this on the edit tab instead of the thumbnail:
http://mikeliuzzi.com/zenFAIL.jpg

this is what gets displayed in the gallery

http://mikeliuzzi.com/test_galleries/zen_test_gallery3/

When I go into the crop thumbnail utility it creates a thumbnail and works from then on, but every single new image is broken until I manually crop the thumbnail, even in existing galleries.

Here is the list of things I've tried:
-refresh the database
-reinstall the entire gallery with a new DB in a new directory
-chmodded the whole damn gallery to 777
-refresh metadata
-purge cache
-new users

There is one thing I found that might be of some significance, I changed the name of the folder after installing zenphoto. Is that a no-no?

thanks for your help,

fixed:

Lesson #1 : don't change the directory name after installing zen-photo....if you really need to move a gallery, reinstall and move the themes